Do I even need to talk about why the opening pages of your book are capital “C” critical? I doubt I do. Writers are readers, and you know how you either fall into a book or lean away from it, and then quit it, usually quickly. As an editor and writing teacher, I’ve spent years…
I’d been thinking about writing an article on the power of using an unexpected detail in a scene, and then the interior design folks on the internet made me aware of the “unexpected red theory”—just the catalyst I needed. The gist of the theory is that adding a bit of red to a room, where…
This past fall I read Rachel Stone’s debut novel, The Blue Iris. As a writing coach, one of the things that captured my interest was the fact that the book was written from multiple points of view—nine, to be exact. It’s not unheard of to do this (Lincoln in the Bardo fan here), but it’s…
How lucky I am that I came across Little, by Edward Carey, while digging around on the internet for book recommendations. My Google search phrases must have included the words “brilliant”, “absurd”, and “hilarious”, because this book is all these things. Little is the dark and dazzling story of the young orphan girl who becomes…
There’s no shortage of writing productivity advice out there, and this post is mostly a roundup of ideas so that you don’t have to go looking. How you’re going to go about getting your writing done is a process you’re going to have to customize for yourself. You’ll get better at putting systems in place…